'Oh, that weary writing!'
In vain do I tell her that writing is as pleasant to me as ever was
the prospect of a tremendous day's ironing to her; that (to some,
though not to me) new chapters are as easy to turn out as new
bannocks. No, she maintains, for one bannock is the marrows of
another, while chapters - and then, perhaps, her eyes twinkle, and
says she saucily, 'But, sal, you may be right, for sometimes your
bannocks are as alike as mine!'
Or I may be roused from my writing by her cry that I am making
strange faces again. It is my contemptible weakness that if I say
a character smiled vacuously, I must smile vacuously; if he frowns
or leers, I frown or leer; if he is a coward or given to
contortions, I cringe, or twist my legs until I have to stop
writing to undo the knot. I bow with him, eat with him, and gnaw
my moustache with him. If the character be a lady with an
exquisite laugh, I suddenly terrify you by laughing exquisitely.
One reads of the astounding versatility of an actor who is stout
and lean on the same evening, but what is he to the novelist who is
a dozen persons within the hour? Morally, I fear, we must
deteriorate - but this is a subject I may wisely edge away from.
We always spoke to each other in broad Scotch (I think in it
still), but now and again she would use a word that was new to me,
or I might hear one of her contemporaries use it.
Pages:
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81